Monday, 23 May 2016

Mind, soul and body

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose – the more
it changes, the more it is the same.

While
most people would consider this a ridiculous claim to make about modern
medicine, the fact is, when you look closely at the approach most people take
to their health and the response of conventional, Allopathic, the most commonly
used medical modality, the more it resonates with elements of truth – things have
not changed as much as we might wish or hope.

I will preface this by saying that no-one disputes modern skills in trauma and
reconstructive surgery, nor indeed the greater although not complete capacity,
to alleviate physical pain. Having said that, modern painkillers are often
ineffective and frequently do more harm than good and there are other ways to
alleviate pain, they are just not able to be patented and provide less
financial profit.

But as a healing mechanism or a medical modality which encourages and maintains
robust health, modern or Allopathic medicine falls far short of the mark and
frequently drifts into modern versions of ‘snake-oil’ and ‘smoke and mirror’
medicine. In this latter category falls ‘maybe medicine’ where people are
treated for diseases they do not have and may never get and where assessing the
efficacy of such treatment is impossible.

The catch-cry of ‘get it early’ cannot ever be proven since often that which is
found ‘early’ may never have become serious anyway, and there is simply no way
of assessing that. To be fair, there is a growing body of research saying
exactly that and warning of the increasingly recognised dangers of ‘too many
tests’ and too many ‘treatments.’

But of course, systems drive behaviour and the Allopathic medical system is now
so dependent upon and entrenched in tests and treatments and maybes that it is
reluctant to change, because, after all, what else would it have? And the money
invested in the approach itself is so enormous that it would be a ‘waste’ not
to use all these tests and treatments and machines and procedures, even if they
are doing ‘more harm than good.’

And so it goes, the system is dependent upon what it is and only something
dramatic and powerful can change it. Beyond of course patient pressure and
demand but the chances of that are greatly reduced by the fact that most people
live with deep fear about becoming ill and particularly in regard to death and
most believe the mantra that modern, Allopathic medicine is as good as it gets
and is going to be the only thing which can save you.Even when demonstrably it is not.

Modern medicine rides like a ‘god’ on the back of society with hospitals, like
temples of old, rising higher, growing bigger, standing grander and becoming more
costly all the time.

Never before, have so many human beings had so much access to medical
treatments and so many medical interventions, not to mention medications,
vaccines, procedures, tests, checks and advice.

None of this would matter if people were generally healthier and disease less
common, but they are not healthier and disease is in fact more common with
serious and chronic diseases at levels never seen before, particularly in
children.

You would think, nay, you would expect that it meant better and more robust
health and a diminishing of disease in general, but it does not.

So, whatever Allopathic or modern medicine is doing, it is not contributing to
robust general health.

Not only that, as the third biggest killer after heart disease and cancer, and
rising, it has become effectively a ‘disease’ in itself where one of the most
dangerous lifestyle choices one can make, particularly if healthy, is to
consult a doctor.

And this is because modern medicine, imprisoned in the mechanical and
materialist reductionist mindset of modern science, is a business, an industry,
and a system where profit, prestige and power hold sway and dictate that
testing, cutting and drugging are the only approach which should be allowed or
can be allowed.

Tests, surgery, medications are big business and in fact, science-medicine is
probably the most profitable and powerful business after the military
industrial complex. It is certainly the most pervasive of any industry and it
is largely controlled by the pharmaceutical industry where the evidence has
long been that profits come before people, despite claims to the contrary.

It is little wonder that research is beginning to show that the science-medical
industry is itself, very sick indeed, with corruption, incompetence,
malpractice, bias, distortions, so commonplace that researchers have said most
research is just plain wrong. No wonder modern medicine has become so
dangerous.

The third
biggest killer, as iatrogenic – Allopathic doctor or medical induced – is
mainly sourced in prescribed medication. In other words, drugs given to treat
real, imagined or possible diseases, have a very good chance of injuring or
killing you, as they do millions, worldwide every year.

How can that be good medicine? What other medical modality would be allowed to
maintain such a high kill and injure rate? None.

Modern science/medicine is quick to mock and often ridicule the medicos
of old for what was deemed to be their ignorance and their barbaric methods.
However, any close study of Allopathic medicine in this day and age, quickly
reveals that many treatments are used, with minimal healing effect, which are
both barbaric and ignorant, and failure indicates their theory and practice are
sourced in no real and useful knowledge.

Many treatments and procedures used by doctors today cause great suffering,
even intense pain, without a healing or cure outcome. It was ever thus, it is
just that failure in the present is accepted and failure in the past is
ridiculed.

One can only wonder how research is stifled and largely unsuccessful
treatments, chemotherapy comes to mind, are retained because the pharmaceutical
industry which profits from their use, dominates and controls Allopathic
medicine. Would we have advanced further if this were not the case and if
science-medicine was free to research where, when and how it wished?

The power of the pharmaceutical industry over science-medicine corrupts the
core principles of science as an objective, rigorous system of enquiry and
research. And in the doing, not only manipulates modern medicine but the health
of everyone who uses it.

The
male domination of science and medicine has made both systems, mechanistic and
militaristic at core. The scalpel is the new sword and the drugs take the place
of cannon balls and bombs with the body as battlefield and enemy.

It is oxymoronic to use military terminology, as happens all the time, for a
medical system which claims to do no harm, even though it does, too often, and
which seeks to heal. Smiting, smoting, striking, destroying against the human
body is counter-intuitive if we are to have optimal health. And yet that is the
approach and people are encouraged not just to mistrust their body and expect
it to betray them, as some enemy would, but to fear it.

The words make the mindset. We see things not as they are but as we are is a
maxim which resonates. Science-medicine sees the body as a machine or ‘bag of
chemicals’ as one erstwhile doctor put it and that is the maxim which underpins
modern, conventional, or Allopathic medicine and which flavours and limits it.

No-one disputes that in some areas, surgery, preferably absolutely necessary
and often it is not, or crisis/trauma, the mechanistic, materialist
reductionist approach is of benefit although more healing and less harm would
be the case if non-Allopathic medical modalities were also used to limit the
wielding of the knife and the toxic dose of drugs.

The
practice of medicine, Allopathic or conventional medicine, today, embraces,
encompasses and treats virtually all people at levels never seen before in
human history. You no longer have to be rich to see a doctor or to have access
to all that modern medicine has to offer. All that there is, certainly in the
First World and even to far greater levels in the Third World, is available to
you from the time you are born until the day you die.

Logic
suggests that we would expect people in general to be healthier, i.e. to have
robust health and to fall sick infrequently and when they do, to recover
quickly. We would expect vastly lower levels of serious and chronic disease
because of the advances in medicine and its availability.

But that
is not the case. There are in fact higher and rising levels of chronic and
serious disease in general and more so in children. Cancer rates have risen
from more than one in ten in 1900 to one in two today.

Children
today have poorer health than their parents did and suffer, often at epidemic
levels, rates of Autism, Diabetes, Auto-Immune Disease, Allergies, Behavioural
and Learning Difficulties, Coeliac Disease and as some data shows, earlier
rates of strokes and heart disease in young people.

Of course
there are many other factors at work in our society which no doubt play a part,
but the fact remains that conventional, modern, Allopathic medicine is unable
to deal with the results, and when you look at the increased rates of vaccination,
often experimental, given earlier, more often, in multiple form, and increased
medication rates and the overuse, if not abuse of antibiotics, the problem, as
it often was in centuries past, may well be medicine itself.

Whatever
modern Allopathic medicine is doing, it is not making or keeping people
healthier.

With all
the advances in technology and knowledge and skills, people in general should
have generally vastly better health. And they do not.

The
argument from conventional science/medicine is that people live longer. Note
they do not claim that people are healthier, they say that people live longer,
completely ignoring the fact that such claims are sourced in distorted data and
that many people who live longer, experience often miserable lives of poor
health, pain and great suffering.

The fact
is human beings do not live longer now than they did thousands of years or even
centuries ago, as research into Egyptian and South American mummies, and a
little research into history and ancestry, also reveals, where they have good nutrition,
sanitation and hygiene, people lived to similar ages that we see today.

Life
evolves slowly and the human organism is essentially no different and recorded
history is so very brief, that common sense dictates that a relatively healthy
human being, from in utero and beyond, with good nutrition, sanitation and
hygiene, is going to live to a certain age. And they did. And they do.

The
biggest factor in longevity was improvements in nutrition, sanitation and
hygiene, as the records show. And as still occurs in developing countries where
such improvements are put in place.

The
shockingly high infant, maternal, child mortality rates up until the early 20th
century, were largely because of poor
nutrition, sanitation and hygiene. Rickets meant deformed pelvic structures and
babies and mothers at risk in childbirth and it meant less robust babies born
to poorly nourished mothers.

Poor
sanitation and hygiene meant higher rates of disease in general and epidemics
and infectious diseases in particular, and when combined with less robust
health, because of inadequate nutrition, disease and mortality rates were often
at astronomical levels. Fix the nutrition, sanitation and hygiene and you start
to see disease, epidemic and mortality rates plummet.

Syphilis
was the other huge factor in infant and child mortality rates, a disease often
unrecognised in the parents, but deadly all the same. It could and did kill
anytime from conception and through the first five years of life, and often
without parents and doctors knowing what had caused the death. One would have
thought the vastly higher rates of blindness and deafness, Syphilis also
brought, would have been indicators, except for the fact that it was a
slumbering sickness which could appear, disappear and reappear again, many years
apart.

This is
why parents, in times of large families could have four or five healthy
children, four or five dead or diseased and then another four or five healthy
children, or a variation on the theme.

Conventional
medicine did come up with effective treatment in the early decades of the
twentieth century for Syphilis and brought this scourge largely to an end.
Having said that, other medical modalities like Homeopathy, Herbal and various
forms of Traditional Medicine were also effective in treating disease in
general and Syphilis in particular, but never took precedence as medical
treatments and so the effect was scattered, occasional, and because of the
emphasis on mechanistic materialist reductionist science/medicine, largely
ignored.

All of
these factors played a part in reducing child and infant mortality rates and
that boosted longevity.None of it
increased one whit the capacity of a human being, in optimal circumstances, to
live a given amount of time, but removing those early kill factors, gave the
impression that people lived longer even though they did not. And they do not.

Number-crunching
can be useful but it is also a tool or weapon to distort and distract. As an
example, you can be told that in this African country the average age at death
is forty-two. Many assume that most people die at forty-two but of course they
do not. The same ‘rules’ apply as they did in centuries past in that if someone
survives the vulnerable first few years of life, when immune function is
beginning to be established and nutrition, sanitation and hygiene are most
crucial, then the chances that you will live to a reasonable age, increase.

In
countries where the average age of death is forty-two, many people live into
their eighties, nineties and beyond. In other words, if they avoid accidents,
HIV/Aids, and have reasonable nutrition, sanitation and hygiene, their
longevity is not so different to those in the First World.

And it
was ever thus. It is simply not true that people live longer with modern
medicine. What is true is that improved sanitation, hygiene and nutrition means
more people survive the first few vulnerable years and have better health in
utero, but they do not per se: live longer.

Although
a qualifier is needed here because mechanistic modern medicine can keep people
alive for longer but in a state of suffering and often misery that we would not
allow a pet to endure. If a few years of such ‘extra life’ nudge up the
longevity factor provided by conventional Allopathic medicine, or rather the mindset
in which it operates, then perhaps we need to question both the mindset and the
application.

Longevity,
like health, is about quality not quantity. The best medicine maintains and
helps to restore, if needed, robust health where one has optimal quality of
life. And the best medicine can only do that when it works with the body, which
is the only healer in any true sense, all treatments being mere support, allowing
the body to maintain and restore, optimal function.

What is
health, is a question which would be answered pretty much the same today as it
would have been hundreds or thousands of years in the past.

Health is
not necessarily complete absence from occasional sickness, and in times past,
minor diseases, particularly in children, were considered to be an important
part of the process of gaining robust health as an adult, and they still are by
those who practice non-Allopathic medicine in the main, but it is generally a
robust, energetic, vigorous constitution, which recovers readily from periods
of sickness and does not suffer from serious or chronic disease.

In other
words, your constitution is strong, you don’t get sick much and if you do you
recover relatively quickly, and suffer no lingering after-effects. Whatever you
do to support your body’s health is in essence the best medicine you can ever
have.

Few probably realise that medications and vaccinations are designed to deceive
the body and trick it into acting unnaturally. How can that not be confusing to
such a complex organism? How can that not create dysfunction? One wonders if
the massive rise in Cancer, those rogue cells which have forgotten how to
suicide, apoptosis, for the good of the whole, might be sourced in such
confusion and designed unnatural responses.

Less is more is probably a good approach and the old saying that erring on the
side of moderation is wise, is particularly sensible when applied to medical
treatments.

Doctors and scientists may well know more at a material and mechanical level
than they knew a century or even fifty years ago, but they still remain largely
ignorant about the How, What and particularly the Why, of bodily function.

They design treatments based on the erroneous belief that the body can be
treated mechanically and materially and that no other factors are at play in
disease. As of course they must given the belief system which underpins modern
science at this point in history and which has done so for a few centuries now.

But each of us has responsibility to and for our own body and the more we take
charge and do our own research, our own thinking, our own intuiting, the better
health we are likely to have. Your body is your best friend and the two of you
are in it for life. Working with the natural function of the human body,
something modern science/medicine does not generally do, is going to optimise
your capacity for health.

Having said that, if conventional medicine and regular trips to the doctor has
you in robust health then keep doing what you are doing. We are all different
and what matters is that what you are doing is working for you.

Every symptom is your body’s attempt to speak to you and every disease is your
body’s attempt to heal. Listen and respect all of it.

Living a spiritual life means connectedness and your body is as important as your mind and your soul, at least while you are living in this material world.

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About Me

Member Media,Entertainment & Arts Alliance.
Member Society of Editors (WA); Member Society of Editors (SA); Member South Australian Writer's Centre. Member South Australian Genealogy and Heraldry Society.